New US Anti-Encryption Bill Released

On April 13, 2016, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, both leading members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced a Bill entitled “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016”.

The Bill would mandate all providers of communications services, software and device manufacturers, and any person who provides a product or method to facilitate a communication or to process or store data to allow law enforcement, with a court order, to render any unintelligible (ie encrypted) data into intelligible (ie decrypted) data or to provide the appropriate technical assistance to obtain such intelligible data. Although there is no mention of possible penalties for failing to abide by the legislation, the Bill states that companies will be compensated for costs directly incurred as a result of the decryption that are reasonably necessary.

The Bill, which has since been dubbed the “Anti-Encryption Bill”, has garnered a lot of criticism for effectively requiring the creation of “backdoors” for decrypting customers’ data. Notably, the introduction of this legislation comes following Apple’s strong stance against assisting law enforcement agents to access data on an encrypted iPhone (more on this story can be found here).